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"Here," said Miss Harson, "is a small branch from an oak tree containing the young leaves and the catkins, which come out together; for the oak belongs, like the willow and the maple, to the division of amentaceous plants." "Oh dear!" sighed Clara at the hard name. But Malcolm repeated: "Amentaceous ament. I know, Miss Harson: it's catkins"
We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every flower-bud spring is peeping. Nature's first flowers are those of the amentaceous trees, and the earliest of these are the pussy willow, the quaking asp, and the hazel.
The singular habit of the witch-hazel, whose blossoms open as the leaves fall, may be presumed to be familiar to all readers; and hardly less curious is the freak of the chestnut, which, almost if not quite alone among our amentaceous trees, does not put on its splendid coronation robes till late in June, and is frequently at the height of its magnificence in mid-July.
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